New, Improved Prairie Dog Pride Logo

Earlier this week we changed our website logo from its usual black and yellow colours to a rainbow-ish incarnation. We did this because the Olympics are being held in Russia, a country that last year passed bigoted laws that are making life bad for lesbians, gays, bisexuals and transgender people, and we want our readers to ponder this Russian shittiness.

(Plus The Guardian redesigned their logo for the Olympics and The Guardian is the best, and we want to be cool like them. Ahem.)

But lo! Nit-picky commentator and Friend O’ The Dog Brad had a complaint: “It bothers me that your logo includes colours from the line of purples,” he wrote in a post a few days ago. “The colours between violet and red are non-spectral and don’t belong on a rainbow.”*

Well, we are nothing if not sensitive to the anal-retentive critiques of our readers! And since, after extensively researching the matter, we have learned that the modern pride flag has six colours(red, orange, yellow, green, royal blue and purple), we’ve updated our logo!

Thanks for helping us learn something interesting and important, Brad!

*Trivia: the co-operative movement has a seven-colour rainbow flag. But it’s easy to confuse the two flags so we should always be nice to entities and people that innocently make this mistake, whether that’s a newspaper like Prairie Dog or, I dunno, someone else.

2 thoughts on “New, Improved Prairie Dog Pride Logo”

At least 50% of my comment was self-aware mockery of my own nerdy weirdness. That said, here’s a chance for some rainbow related trivia:

(a) While most English-speakers use violet and purple as synonyms, other languages (including French) often draw a sharper distinction between the colors: violet is more bluish, with purple reserved for colours on the red side.

(b) Indigo’s a bullshit colour. Sir Isaac Newton (science god and all around asshole) had a hard-on for the number seven (mostly because he thought the number of colours should match the number of notes in the C-major scale). He foolishly added indigo to make the numbers work. In terms of spectral width and human visual acuity, it would have made more sense to divide green than blue.

(c) The order in which languages add basic colour terms is mostly predictable; for instance, no known language has added orange, pink or brown before having words for white, red, yellow, green, blue and black.

(d) English has 11 basic colour terms. Russian and Italian have 12: they distinguish between azure and blue in the same way we distinguish between pink and red. Just as you would be very unlikely to call pink “light red”, native speakers find “light blue” to be a weird combination of words.

(e) Speaking of which, tints and shades (lighter and darker versions of colours created by combining them with white and black) are also non-spectral and don’t belong in a rainbow (I’m looking at you ICA).

That’s the only video version I could find on the web anymore and it might not work. It’s from a BBC doc on colour and it looks at the Himba Tribe from Namibia. Short slightly inaccurate version: there are two greens that look nearly identical to our eyes because they’re both “green” but for Himba people, who have two different words for those colours (and from what I can tell may only have 4 or 5 words for colours), they can distinguish them easily. Meanwhile, they have no colour for blue so they have difficulty distinguishing blue from green. There’s an experiment at about the 7min mark that’s pretty interesting.